Item, one leg, kept. Nairn Aldebrigh, household account, entered against nothing
She went over him properly at first light, when there was nobody in the room and the boy was still under and could not be alarmed by a stranger’s hands.
The leg was going to hold. She had known that since the middle of the night, when the foot went from slate to something that was nearly a colour, and she had sat by it for two hours with her fingers on the ankle feeling the thing come back like water finding a channel, and had not been able to stop herself grinning in the dark like an idiot.
It was the rest of him she did not like.
She started at the good leg, because that was the habit, compare the pair, and the good leg was wrong. Not injured. Not cold. It had the tone of a leg belonging to a man of about fifty who had done a hard winter, on a boy of seventeen who cut peat for a living. She put her hand on the calf and squeezed and it came back slow, the way a thing does when there is not much behind it.
The arms were the same. The grip was the same. She got a finger on the pulse at the throat and counted and it was doing more work than it should have been doing for a boy lying still in a warm room.
There was nothing wrong with him anywhere.
There was less of him everywhere.
Su’inn sat back on the stool with her hands in her lap.
“What am I looking at.”
You know what you are looking at.
“I know that there is a boy in this bed who is poorer than he was on Tuesday and I cannot find the hole.” She kept her voice low, because of the room. “I have gone over him twice. If a man came to me with this and no history I would say malnourishment or a long fever and I would be wrong on both and I would know I was wrong, because there is no wasting and the colour is good and he was cutting peat forty hours ago.”
Yes.
“So what is the name of it.”
It does not have one, said Azaelis. That is not evasion. It genuinely does not have one in any book you have ever been allowed to read, because the form was struck out of the schedule ninety years ago and everything downstream of the form went with it. There is no diagnosis because there is no cause, because the cause was removed from the teaching.
Su’inn sat and looked at the boy.
“That is the worst thing anybody has ever said to me.”
I know.
“There is a whole shape of harm in the world that my house cannot see because my house decided to stop teaching how to make it.” She put her hand flat on the blanket. “How many. How many people are walking around tired for no reason that anyone can find, because somebody ninety years ago was in a hurry and knew a form.”
I do not know. Some.
“You could find out.”
I could not, said Azaelis, because they present as nothing. That is the entire property of it. There is no register of people who are simply less.
The argument they had after that was the coldest thing that had yet happened between them, and it happened almost entirely in silence, across about four hours, while she washed cloths and Nairn made bread and nobody in the house said anything at all.
She did not shout. She had considered shouting for about ten minutes and had put it down, because shouting at somebody inside your own head is a thing you can only do once before you learn what it feels like to be shouted at from the inside.
So she simply did not speak to him.
And discovered, somewhere in the second hour, what a genuinely cruel thing that was, and did it anyway.
He said nothing for the whole of it. He did not apologise and he did not explain and he did not fill the silence, and she got as far as the fourth hour before she understood that he had done this before, that a man who has spent four hundred years in other people’s houses has been frozen out by experts, and that he had a technique for it, and that the technique was to be extremely quiet and wait, and that it was working.
“You are managing me.”
I am waiting.
“You have a method.”
I have eleven households’ worth of method and every one of them is disgraceful and I am using the least disgraceful one, said Azaelis. Would you prefer the second least? It involves being helpful about small tasks until the other person feels petty.
“I would not.”
No. It is very effective and I have always hated it.
She wrung out a cloth.
“I am not finished being angry.”
You should not be finished. I have not stopped being right and you have not stopped being right and those two facts are going to sit in this house together for the rest of the week, and I have found that they do not resolve, they simply get older.
Dorrin’s boy woke at noon and was called Halbrick and wanted, in order: water, his mother, to know if the leg was there, and to know if he was going to be lame.
Su’inn gave him the water and sent for the mother and let him look at the leg himself, which was the only honest way to answer the third, and sat on the stool by the bed for the fourth.
“You will limp for a year,” she said. “After that it will depend on you. If you sit with it in front of you like a plank it will stiffen and you will limp for the rest of your life, and if you walk on it before you want to, which is going to be miserable, you will get most of it.”
“Most.”
“Most is very good. I do not say most often.”
He lay there and worked through it and she watched him do it, and he was not clever but he was not slow either, he was seventeen and thinking hard about a thing that had happened to him and would be part of him now.
“There is a second thing,” he said.
Su’inn did not move.
“I am tired,” said Halbrick. “I have been lying in a bed for a day and I am tired like the end of a week.”
Su’inn, said Azaelis.
She sat on the stool with her hands on her knees.
She could tell him. She had the words, or enough of them. She could say: something was taken out of you to keep that leg, from everywhere at once, and it will not come back, and you will be a man who tires early and no physician will ever find it and I am telling you now so that you are not thirty-five and thinking you are lazy.
And he would carry that up the hill and down it for fifty years. Every hard day would have a cause. Every time he sat down before his father did there would be a reason with a shape and a name, and the name would be a thing that was done to him in a yard while he was unconscious by a woman he had thanked.
Or she could say nothing, and he would be tired, and he would think it was him.
There was no third one. She looked for a third one with some care.
“Yes,” she said. “You will be.”
“For how long.”
“I do not know.”
“That is not much of an answer.”
“No,” Su’inn agreed. “It is not. And I could give you a better one and it would not be true, and you are going to be dealing with this leg for a very long time and I would rather you knew from the start which of us lies to you.”
Halbrick looked at the ceiling.
“All right,” he said.
She stayed another minute and then went out into the yard and stood in the wind for a while with her arms folded, and did not ask Azaelis whether she had done the right thing, and he did not tell her.
Nairn found her at the wall at dusk with a bundle in her hands.
“Bread, cheese, and there is a knife in it which I want back if you are ever up this road again, and if you are not then it is a knife I lost.” She put it down on the stones. “You go in the morning.”
“You said three days.”
“I did. That was before four men went down that hill telling everybody about a leg.” Nairn leaned on the wall beside her and looked out at the same nothing. “There is a woman at Ennick who took the spade out of Dorrin’s boy. That is what is at the bottom of the hill tonight, and by market it will be a woman who saved a leg that was black, and by the week after that it will be a woman who did it with her hands and never asked a penny, and I do not have to tell you what it will be by the month after.”
“No.”
“They are not being wicked. They are being pleased.” Nairn’s shutter face did not move. “That is worse. A rumour somebody wants to spread travels four times as fast as one they are frightened of, and there is nothing in the world you can do about a good one.”
Su’inn stood looking at the dark coming up the valley.
“How far to the next thing that is not a road.”
“Six hours over the top, and then you are out of this ward and into the next, and I have not been over the top in eleven years and could not tell you what is there.” Nairn straightened up. “Go before light. The peat men come at seven.”
“Nairn.”
“No,” said Nairn, and went inside.
She sat up in the dairy that night with the bundle beside her and did not sleep for a long time.
“Say it,” she said at last. “You have had it since the wall.”
It is not a good one.
“They never are.”
Every time I am at the wheel you are loud for a day and a half, said Azaelis, and I have now been at the wheel for two hours in a yard in front of six people, one of whom is going to market on Thursday. A pause. And a leg that was black and came back is the single most describable thing that has ever happened to any of them. They will not say a woman. By Thursday they will say a healer, and a healer is a trade, and a trade is a thing the province keeps a register of.
Su’inn lay back on the straw.
“So the more I do,” she said, “the easier I am to find.”
Yes.
“And the more I do not do, the more people go up a hill on a hurdle two hours too late.”
Yes, said Azaelis. That is the arrangement. It is not the one we wrote in this room on Tuesday. It is the one that was always here.